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HENRY R. WINKLER
along with pleas for the reassessment of the assumptions upon which
policy has been based. He is not the first to discover that economic aid
programs administered through native oligarchies that would suffer
from genuine reform are not likely to be effective. But he makes
his
point cooly, without shrillness, in a way that might make those who
should listen more likely to do so. His logic, too, is brought to life by a
sense of history that demonstrates, by contrast, the frightening inade–
quacies of the behavioral theorists who have convinced themselves that
their games - like those of Zbigniew Brezezinski with his technetronic
society - have a direct relationship to the facts of real life.
A new foreign policy for the United States is clearly and agonizing–
ly imperative. However one may be moved by Noam Chomsky's often
brilliant insights and his moral commitment, his passion hardly offers a
useful guide to how the change may be achieved. On the other hand,
Morgenthau's
A New Foreign Policy for the United States,
no matter
how much one might reject its theoretical framework,
if
it were read
in Washington as well as on college campuses, might help us begin
to
extricate ourselves from the stale slogans and senseless actions that have
plagued American policy since at least the middle fifties. How good
it would be
if
we could believe that we have the capacity to learn from
past mistakes.
Henry R. Winkler
LEVELING
BEYOND ALL THIS FIDDLE: ESSAYS 1955-1967.
By
A. Alverez. Rendom
HOUle.
$8.95.
Of Alvarez one might say what he does of V. S. Pritchett:
"He keeps
his
standards so high while performing so regularly that we
tend to take him for granted." Just turned forty, Alvarez is a good
generation younger than Pritchett, and these essays certify that he is, as
he wants to be, more "serious" than even the best of his elders. To
be
"serious" includes avoiding Pritchett's "humanist fault," making
"too
many allowances, as though loath to hurt the feelings of some poor,
dead author or deader book." And yet Alvarez isn't by any means as
ruthless as he asserts; he avoids the hollow abusiveness of lesser British
journalists - Muggeridge, Brigid Brophy - at worst slighting rather
than insulting the old fogies of literature. His criticism has a positive
force: the art that brings out the best in
him
is the kind that assaults
the boundaries of life. Thus, he writes well on Keats, whom he sees as
using poetry to fashion an understanding of and even a desire for
death, and Lawrence, when "the imminence of death sharpened his life
